A New Era of Book Marketing

Extra: If an author has limited time, which of the leading social media platforms should they focus on?
Heim: From an author's perspective, the best way is to jump into the conversation on Twitter first, because it's such a wide net that you can cast, and, because it is open source, there are so many ways that you can instantly find people you may be interested in. If I had a client who was just starting out on Twitter, I would say, let's go to Listorious.com [to] find people who [might] ... share your heart for what you are doing. ... [For example,] if you go to Listorious.com ... [and] want to know about people in education, it will show you thought leaders in education. So it's a tool that I think helps people find people to share with.

Then, once you have the Twitter platform developed, if you want to launch a blog, you have a built-in audience ready to go. Otherwise, if you wake up one day and say, "I am going to start a blog today," you have no other way to communicate with like-minded people, and with all the other blogs out there, [those people] are never going to find you. Eventually, Facebook will find its place somewhere in between there, but the most fish are sitting in that Twitter space in terms of daily interaction and conversation.

Extra: What makes an author's Facebook page effective?
Heim: I think ... engagement ... where the author is engaged [with fans], talking about where they are or who they're meeting, and just observing life. I also think you have to have multimedia-show where you're speaking ..., when new books are coming out, and video. Video is great-it's easy, it's viral, you can post it on YouTube.com and spread it.